Posted
by
timothy
on Thursday May 01, 2014 @03:57PM
from the she-oughtta-know dept.

AthanasiusKircher (1333179) writes "Deborah Fitzgerald, a historian of science and dean of MIT's School of the Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, speaks out in a Boston Globe column about the importance of the humanities, even as STEM fields increasingly dominate public discussion surrounding higher education. '[T]he world's problems are never tidily confined to the laboratory or spreadsheet. From climate change to poverty to disease, the challenges of our age are unwaveringly human in nature and scale, and engineering and science issues are always embedded in broader human realities, from deeply felt cultural traditions to building codes to political tensions. So our students also need an in-depth understanding of human complexities — the political, cultural, and economic realities that shape our existence — as well as fluency in the powerful forms of thinking and creativity cultivated by the humanities, arts, and social sciences.' Fitzgerald goes on to quote a variety of STEM MIT graduates who have described the essential role the humanities played in their education, and she concludes with a striking juxtaposition of important skills perhaps reminscent of Robert Heinlein's famous description of an ideal human being: 'Whatever our calling, whether we are scientists, engineers, poets, public servants, or parents, we all live in a complex, and ever-changing world, and all of us deserve what's in this toolbox: critical thinking skills; knowledge of the past and other cultures; an ability to work with and interpret numbers and statistics; access to the insights of great writers and artists; a willingness to experiment, to open up to change; and the ability to navigate ambiguity.' What other essential knowledge or skills should we add to this imaginary 'toolbox'?"

Same route I took. English undergrad, web programming/MIS master's degree. Now I do what I really wanted to do all along with the English degree, which is write documentation (along with various other duties as an analyst, many of which require writing in some fashion as well.)

As an engineering major, I took plenty of courses in humanities, and I feel that I got a very well rounded education. At least at my school, the humanities were notneglected at all. Everyone had to take a "core" of mandatory classes in literature, and also take a required number of elective courses in history, economics, sociology, etc.

Still, I can communicate and write better than 90% of my peers

The problem with humanities majors is not that they can't communicate, but that they have nothing interesting to say.

The problem with humanities majors is not that they can't communicate, but that they have nothing interesting to say.

Agreed (to the extent that all generalizations are dumb). I don't think you need to learn all the extra artsy fartsy in order to master your language, though of course it helps to have some context.

I've only officially studied science/tech fields, but I've always been interested in language, and like any complex system, I like to pay attention to its details and play with it. I grew up in Finland, went to an international school mostly because of the language aspect, but ended up getting a science degree

I've never understood why math/science/programming geeks are stereotypically bad at spelling (or language in general). It should be about the same kind of attention to detail in both cases.

Personally I'm excellent at spelling but it often doesn't come through in my writing because I'm in a hurry, I hate writing, and I'm such a critic of writing that I can't stand to go back and read my own stuff. Reading my own writing usually makes me cringe. This means I don't double check my writing. I'll notice someone use used "it's" instead of "its", but since I never read my own stuff I never correct my own stuff.

"The problem with humanities majors is not that they can't communicate, but that they have nothing interesting to say."

My colleagues disagree, my technology presentations are well attended inside IBM. In part because I throw in little history tidbits or even where some words come from, both technical and non-technical.

A good example is when I talk about archaic standards preventing progress, like the size of a Roman wheel cart setting the size of train tracks and roads. (Not strictly true, but it is a good story) Or how market momentum creates atrocities like the QWERTY keyboard. (or the IBM PC....)Both illustrate the need to work from a clean board to ensure we are not architect-ing solutions because "that is the way we do it here at IBM". And we do a lot of that, because template reuse is so efficient, but hinders innovation.

And the humanities is a broad subject, covering but not limited to: art, philosophy, history, and literature. If they have nothing you find interesting to listen to in those subjects, you may be the close minded one.

Ok, I'll bite. I'm currently a STEM major. The main reason, at least that I have personally observed anyways, of why STEM majors dislike being forced to take a lot of humanities:

1: Most of them are useless, at least to us. We (usually) don't need philosophy classes to teach us logic and argument, knowing that the Mesopotamians had a primitive battery technology is equally useless, and we really dislike the subjectivity in grading in literature / composition courses. My one history class I had to take, e

I also disagree on point 1.Most of the pure CIS students I work with cannot debate or put together a coherent argument why one course of action is better than the other. Mostly it comes down to "I am right, because I say so." Often it comes down to trying to shout people down.

They also almost never take into consideration the business and political aspects. I don't play politics, I am straight forward and forthright and it serves me well. But knowing what the political players are up to, how they likely wil

I got a "D" on an art paper once. or would have.The subject was declared to be "What is Art?" (i know, I know, but that is what the prof wanted)

Most everyone got into esthetics, beauty, meaning, and such qualities.

I put forth the idea that Art was boiled down to two requirements:

1. It must be an Artifact, literally "made with hands"2. It must speak to us something about the human condition

That was his initial grade. Then he thought about it. He couldn't reconcile why the idea offended him. So he gave it to his brother to read.His brother was in the CS field. Electrical engineer and architect I think.

"He has it right. He cut all your BS out of it and got it down to two ideals, and he is dead on. You just don't like it."

I got an A+, and he submitted my paper for a publication. (rejected of course, they were probably just as insulted)

Then earned my IT degree later in life. Hard to eat on a Humanities degree salary.

Still, I can communicate and write better than 90% of my peers, and that gives me a major advantage over them.

Being able to communicate between people is as important as being able to enable communication between two machines.

You make an important distinction. Humanities classes can be good, but a humanities major isn't much use. In the balance of things, we just don't need that many people to study art history, and while knowing some art history is useful it's not as useful as knowing some chemistry, physics or math.

For STEM we've developed a lot of techniques that allow us to g deeper, check our work against reality, provide objective results and in doing so build on previous work. We can put a lot of people to work explo

I took humanities as a degree because I am a "Renaissance Man" and have a huge span of interest and a good sense of long term trends and a long view on how things should be done now.

Humanities let me play to that strength, more so than a CIS degree.

To eat, I took a job selling parts over the internet in the early 90s in Silicon Valley to pay for my last years at SJSUBeing able to explain the technology in terms non-techs could understand. I was also good at understanding their requirements, so I had better

BTW, my love of complex systems came from looking at engineering and architectural feats of mankind, like the Cathedrals, Roman Aqueducts and buildings.

Not to mention the art of Escher, and the surrealists.

Oh, and the philosophical aspects too. My greatest tool is Socrates/Plato's Dichotomy: A thing cannot be true and untrue at the same time (If A, then not B), for eliminating factors causing problems. And Occam Razor. And more besides... a lot of our IT ideals come from the philosophers. Even Nietzsche

I actually found the BSIS comically easy, and watched people flounder.

But then I was 37, not 21, and I had 12 years of IT experience. Even adding in being a new Dad, it was just a few hours every night, and some time on the weekend. Easy peasey, I found the Online experience much better suited to my INTJ personality.

I used pointers early in the into C class I had to take. We worked in groups which then did "peer" reviews. One of my "peers" gave me a "0" because my code was "too complicated, we haven't covered this stuff"

The teacher adjusted his grade down for participation, and mine up for using pointers.

That's the problem, the humanities that are taught are irrelevant and useless. Partly due to it being what those in charge want to teach, partly due to someone pursuing a STEM degree being very focused on their GPA for getting a job, not wanting to lose potentially tens of thousands of dollars in starting salary because a professor in a subjective exam gave a B rather than an A.

They take far too much time to pursue seriously, for every credit earned in humanities there is some very valuable STEM subject bei

Without classics we wouldn't have architecture or democracy.Without philosophy we wouldn't have logicWithout art we wouldn't have beauty or elegant design.Without religion we wouldn't have modern science or medicine...of course you wouldn't know about the Medieval monks or the Golden Age of Islam if you hadn't studied History, but I suppose that is another 'irrelevant' humanities study.

Certainly there are plenty of classes out there with questionable value. It's a shame that you missed out on good on

I would have taken mandarin, but then in realizing why I was taking it, I would have changed majors entirely. In any event because they are useful, they cost money, and were not an option.

Given how incredibly specialized STEM fields are, with my direct experience being electrical and computer engineering, I would still have preferred no foreign language and more tech courses. Courses I still want to take, but that time has passed and college classes are far too expensive for anything but casual study.

Perhaps you mean several dozen books, or actually journal papers, because if you've ever tried to implement cutting edge technology described only in academic journals, you'd understand that a lot of assumptions are made about the reader and the depth of his MATHEMATICAL background. Yeah you can follow references and rediscover hundred year old obscure math. Do all that, or you take a course by a studied scholar who has done all that and can boil it down for you. That same professor may also be willing to

Since soviet studies was an elective I was stuck with, I do actually know that though I suspect the mutual dislike between Russia and the USA is far more complex than invasion, perhaps the reason for the invasion and the very polarized leadership each country has. If harboring a grudge over invasions was it, Americans would still be sore at Great Britain for... quite a few early issues and headaches.

Regardless, the reason most of us spend money to go get an advanced degree is exclusively for the economic v

I got my English major in 1988. I've been employed continuously since then, with the exception of a few months during the bursting of the tech bubble. I did not obtain a second degree (however, I have accumulated a fair amount of work experience over the last 26 years).

Which is exactly why I got a history MA rather than a computer sciences degree, even though I do IT for a loving. I believe I'm a much more rounded human being with the information I gained during that time, and my interest in the humanities has never waned.

Sadly, I was earning 35K a year fresh out of grad school doing basic IT work in San Francisco in an office with MBAs also fresh out of grad school, who were easily earning 150K or more a year, plus bonuses.

I always joked with them that the only difference between them and me was that they happened to find money interesting.

[Anecdote] One of my first jobs out of school was working with a bunch of self-taught developers of which none of them except one person had a STEM degree. Econ, environmental studies, theater, political science. The product they wrote ended up being very popular in that particular market niche and took a healthy slice from the dominant player in that market. I've never encountered another workplace setup like that ever again.

This gap has been talked about since C.P. Snow's famous Two Cultures [wikipedia.org] lecture, but this describes only a general trend, and one more prevalent in general society than the academy;. It certainly does not mean that all humanities students are ignorant of the sciences, and when one works in an academic setting one regularly finds counterexamples. For example, a Classics scholar working with papyri or other manuscripts will probably gain a solid knowledge of optics, the chemistry of paper, etc. I have read publications on aspects of philology that employed statistics to a degree you would think the writer had read maths at uni instead. Historians often have to read detailed archeological dig reports, and that brings in other scientific phenomena they are more likely to be aware of than many peopel who gained a degree in other science fields.

Your mistake here is to assume that humanities majors are scientists or work as scientists. A tiny fraction are and do, but almost all do not. For STEM people it is necessary to remain part scientist throughout their whole career or they will not be good at what they do. Humanities graduates out of academia just need to give pretty speeches now and then.

The only tweak I'd make is to add dialectic (Socratic, not Hegelian or Marxist) to the rhetoric. But try selling a rigorous curriculum like that in today's Humanities departments. 85% of them won't allow it. It's too demanding.

Indeed. And humanities majors are a lot more prone to think they know it all than STEM folks are, because STEM folks get their own limitations shown to them all the time. That is where some of the most evil and destructive ideas come from.

1: It seems fairly common among humanities students that, unless they also study some "hard science" subject on the side, they are fully aware of their own weakness in those subjects and do their utmost to avoid having to come close to them.

2: It seems fairly endemic among STEM students that they believe that all humanities stuff is useless garbage that matters to nobody and that everything can be solved by "logic".

Disclaimer: I'm a STEM graduate (chemistry) and have been out of school for about 15 years.

The company I work for is essentially an IT services and consulting firm. Since IT and software development is not a profession like engineering or medicine, educational backgrounds differ wildly from person to person. One of the extremely rare traits that is great for our new hires to have is the critical thinking/troubleshooting/organization skills that STEM education provides, combined with a good grasp of communications skills that the humanities provide. While an English or fine arts major may not have the technical background to do some of the work we do, it's sure nice to find a STEM graduate who can write in complete sentences and document their work well.

One of the other things that a well-rounded education does for you is that it makes you a more interesting person. I've had the opportunity to work with lots of people over the years. Those who are 100% tech-focused and those who are 100% "fluff"-focused aren't very pleasant to deal with. Somewhere in the middle of these extremes (further towards the technical in my field) can make a very knowledgeable co-worker who is also plugged into daily life and can talk intelligently about other subjects. People who are all the way over to the techie side do very good technical work, but you certainly wouldn't put them in front of a customer and won't get good documentation of their excellent work.

I'm really not trying for self-promotion here, but I do feel that one of the reasons I haven't been unemployed for a very long time is because I'm flexible enough and have a good enough personality that employers don't feel like they're forced to keep me around just for my knowledge.

When I was in school, bashing my brain finishing my science education, I do remember looking at the humanities, psychology and communications majors and thinking they couldn't possibly amount to anything. Looking back, I'm glad a well-rounded education was forced on me in the form of required general education classes. Allowing someone to get through schooling without at least some attempt at exploring the other side (and this cuts both ways...) means they get the equivalent of a DeVry or ITT Technical Institute education.

I'm not quite sure where Dean Fitzgerald is coming from with this editorial. It's not as if every accredited ABET school doesn't already teach humanities as part of its engineering curriculum. In fact, the ABET 2000 accreditation process requires every engineering school to demonstrate that its undergraduate students are exposed to cultural, ethical, and economic concepts.

As someone who works at a university and teaches engineering courses, I've heard similar remarks from faculty members in the humanities throughout my career. To me this is just another example of the old "engineers aren't fully rounded human beings, because they haven't majored in the humanities" spiel.

"So our students also need an in-depth understanding of human complexities - the political, cultural, and economic realities that shape our existence - as well as fluency in the powerful forms of thinking and creativity cultivated by the humanities, arts, and social sciences."

I agree completely. But where are they going to get that understanding? From my experience, probably not in a humanities classroom.

In too many humanities courses, it's not about critical thinking, it's about figuring out the personal beliefs of the professor, because in many cases your grade depends on not offending those beliefs. I saw it when I was a student, and I still see it as a faculty member today. Too much of the grading in the humanities curriculum is entirely subjective, and in that sense I mean that it's the professor's opinion that counts the most... and the students know it.

When I give an exam problem, the student's political and religious beliefs are completely irrelevant to their grades. The answer is either right or wrong, with partial credit assigned according to a standard rubric. My personal prejudices are meaningless. I wouldn't have it any other way, and neither would my colleagues.

A good engineering course teaches the essence of critical thinking: look at a problem, analyze it, write down a system of relevant equations, and solve it. What passes for critical thinking in many humanities courses is: "Repeat back my personal viewpoint verbatim, or else suffer the consequences with your grade."

So I think I'll take this latest editorial from Dean Fitzgerald with a very, very large shaker of salt. This strikes me as yet another in a very long series of not-so-subtle digs at STEM curriculums.

I'm not quite sure where Dean Fitzgerald is coming from with this editorial. It's not as if every accredited ABET school doesn't already teach humanities as part of its engineering curriculum....This strikes me as yet another in a very long series of not-so-subtle digs at STEM curriculums.

I think you miss two important points of her essay.

The first is that she is at MIT. She makes the point that MIT has already "drunk the kool aid" of the importance of the humanities and that even in a highly "STEM" institution like that, Humanities are considered crucial. In fact MIT has only 6 "schools", and Humanities is one of them on par with Engineering and Science.

But MIT can get away with setting its own standards, and that leads to her other point: that there is a strong emerging fetishism with ST

Who is this "we" that wants that, and when did they decide it was the university's mission to provide?

"We" could be seen as the universities' own mission statements. For example, the university I did my undergraduate studies at claims that it is "working to expand knowledge in the service of humanity through learning, justice and faith." But it's not just my fairly small Jesuit institution that has such social goals. I searched for the mission statements of Ivy League unis and got things like the following

What other essential knowledge or skills should we add to this imaginary 'toolbox'?"

Whatever they are (and Heinlein's list is very good), the skills that we need to live as well-rounded humans cannot be perceived, checked off, or checked in like items on a requirements list or lines of code. A great problem with technology, and with most practitioners of it, is the instrumental view of the world it inculcates. As the Dean says, the humanities represent a very different way of thinking and understanding th

I skimmed the article ( a little better than normal for/.), but it looked like he was arguing about the importance of humanities courses rather than humanities degrees. I'd agree with him that our current focus on STEM doesn't need to harm humanities courses. As I've grown in my field, I've found as great a wealth in my humanities classes as I have in my more advanced math courses.

The humanities are a great way for a STEM student to round him/herself. Especially since Russia/India/China graduate so many vanilla STEM students that being able to communicate effectively and think critically are a great way stand-out. But the humanities can be difficult, time consuming, and expensive.

I believe the system is still the same as when I was there (before the electron had been discovered). If you majored in a science or engineering, you had to take 8 classes in a declared humanities concentration. That would qualify as a minor at other schools.

Me: "I have no doubts that the technology will function just fine. But in this case, it's not the technology that's the problem. We could have cheap housing all over the place, presently, and solve a million housing problems. But the problem isn't the technology."

Friend: "Well what else would it be?"

I explained about Seattle City's law that you can only have 8 people living in a housing unit, regardless of the size, and that this is on the liberal end of things, as far as most cities go.

I explained about zoning, and restriction, and neighbors.

I explained that if you could snap your fingers and make floating or underground housing, for absolutely free, either above or below the city of Seattle, people would rage with anger and complain of crime, undesirables, unsightlys, and plummeting housing values.

The middle class stores most of its wealth in its houses, and so everybody has a gigantic freak-out if anything happens to cause housing prices to go down. We hold as a society the notion that a house is an investment vehicle, and will do anything in our collective power to make sure that housing prices go up, up, up, faster than the rate of inflation. We'll talk about "quality" and "community" and "clean neighborhoods," whatever it takes, to make sure that the next generation spends more on our houses than the generation that came before.

What use is a 3-D printer that can print houses with ease?

What use are robots that can programmatically generate great housing in a for-loop?

I mean, besides becoming "the enemy of all humankind" and having all federal, state, and local laws applied against you with every bit of scrutiny that can be mustered?

You "study the humanities" not so that you learn some kind of scientific truth about the human being. You study the humanities so that you aren't naive, and waste the investment everybody's put into you.

The single biggest thing that renders useless an otherwise-great STEM education is the lack of ability to write well.

Legion are the devs who string together many words, but forget to have a verb or period at the end. Innumerable are the IT wonks who can't scrape together a coherent and concise summary of 1000-page compliance reports. I swear, the collective plural noun for some of the security analysts at work is "a shimmer of tin foil hats" or "a fuckery of subjectivism"...and they don't even understand the nature of the criticism.

Can I *PLEASE* have a critical thinker and good writer in the house???? Anyone??

Science does no good if you cannot express a coherent hypothesis, imagine a threshold, or string together a sequence of actual actions for testing. In medicine this costs lives.Technology is an interchange, it does no good if you cannot listen to a problem, and express understanding back. At this moment in software, we're awash in UX implementations that aren't traceable to a functional problem.Engineering compounds the problem later without functional expression and holistic and temporal views. Ask a Boeing maintenance tech about the plethora of could-have-been-shared 1-off components in 20-40 year old jets.Math does no good if you cannot draw a picture. Ask the Morton Thiokol guys about their reports on the o-rings on the space shuttle.

Among other "humanities" like history and writing/composition, Tufte [edwardtufte.com] ought to be mandatory for high-school seniors in a STEM program.

The single biggest thing that renders useless an otherwise-great STEM education is the lack of ability to write well.

Legion are the devs who string together many words, but forget to have a verb or period at the end. Innumerable are the IT wonks who can't scrape together a coherent and concise summary of 1000-page compliance reports. I swear, the collective plural noun for some of the security analysts at work is "a shimmer of tin foil hats" or "a fuckery of subjectivism"...and they don't even understand the nature of the criticism.

Can I *PLEASE* have a critical thinker and good writer in the house???? Anyone??

You are absolutely correct. Most people with STEM backgrounds cannot write a coherent paragraph or make a coherent presentation. But guess what? The same is true with most humanities majors.

I used to serve on a faculty committee that evaluated essays for the entire university. As a group, we would read a short essay, grade it, and determine if the student needed to take remedial composition courses before graduation.

I never saw any significant correlation between a particular major and writing skill. The good, mediocre, and bad writers were pretty much spread across the entire student body.

The one correlation I've observed in my career is this: good writers universally tend to be good readers. They read for pleasure, and read a wide variety of books. Those also tend to be exactly the people who have good critical thinking skills, because they've had the voices of hundreds or thousands of different authors in their heads all their lives. That exposure to so many different viewpoints is absolutely critical.

If you want to make people better writers, then make them better readers. That is the hard part, and there is no simple solution.

From climate change to poverty to disease, the challenges of our age are unwaveringly human in nature and scale, and engineering and science issues are always embedded in broader human realities, from deeply felt cultural traditions to building codes to political tensions.

If I have a disease, I want my doctor to heal me; not ponder my deeply felt cultural traditions.

Russia's advance into Ukraine is much like Germany moving into Poland in 1939. This is a very big deal. Yet it isn't even on the front page of CNN today. It's a one-line entry on Fox. On Reuters, it's the top story.

PPE was developed by Oxford back in the 1920s because they thought a largely humanities driven syllabus centered around ancient history wasn't very practical. Many universities offer it these days, and is one of the best non-STEM courses around.

If the rules of science were defined by reality, reality would have changed when Einstein proved Newton wrong. After all, reality defined Newton's laws first, but then defined them differently a couple hundred years later.

Additionally, some of the humanities do have rules. There are rules for what is considered to be a rational argument, and there are rules that determine what conclusions you can draw based on your data set. There are rules to history, there are rules to (analytic) philosophy (continental p

I'd feel much better about the liberal arts education that many kids get these days if philosophy didn't seem so rare. I swear it seems like you can get a degree without ever seeing anything other than the steaming bullshit ladled out by "deconstructionists".

Let's apply STEM (well, Engineering only, I guess) techiques[sic] to make these Humanities guys irrelevant. If a problem is so poorly defined or understood that it's considered an art, isn't it time that we examined these problems scientifically, such that they become sciences, not art? Ultimately, absolutely everything is a science.

Let's apply STEM (well, Engineering only, I guess) techiques[sic] to make these Humanities guys irrelevant. If a problem is so poorly defined or understood that it's considered an art, isn't it time that we examined these problems scientifically, such that they become sciences, not art? Ultimately, absolutely everything is a science.

They should try that with economics. What could possibly go wrong?

You mean, other than the fact that economists might actually start acting like humans?

Well, he's right, but unfortunately, the study of humanities in modern higher education has become a wasteland of anti-academic thinkers who viciously punish nonconformity and "ists" with an ax to grind and a debt to wring out of people whose ancestors they believe slighted their ancestors.

It is sad when people interested in the sciences, who should be trained in recognizing a range of values at their hands, tar everyone with the same brush.

I am aware of FIRE's work and they 1) deal with only 400 institutions (the US has nearly 5,000, and furthermore the humanities are studied worldwide), 2) they are interested in speech by students, which may in some cases overlap with what faculty at humanities departments are lecturing in, but is by no means the same.

Then, in a rant on "outliers" versus "the middle of a trend", you link to a YouTube video dealing with one single university. Again, can we have some sense of perspective, please?

You're one of those nutters who think that Generalizations are bad because you have no Idea what outliers are and don't realize that generalizations don't limit individuals to being outliers; Nor do you care to do any fucking research at all before you flap your anecdotal gums, because you haven't a clue whether you're an outlier or in the middle of the trend -- It just doesn't fucking matter to you, it's all about YOUR experience. Oh how dare they drip a bit of paint on Your special Snowflake experience when talking about the vast majority of experience.

The fact that certain cultures have deeply felt traditions about the value of pi does not mean that a mathematician should be aware of them to be a competent mathematician, or even a competent human being.

It does if he's trying to explain why a speedometer is reading wrong.

The fact that other cultures have deeply felt traditions concerning the transfer of blood does not mean that a biochemist needs to know about Jehovah's witnesses.

It might to a doctor trying to convince parents to not let a child die.

I know the twitter generation have short attention spans so here's the tl;dr version: sometimes being right isn't enough, and how you say it matters as much as what you say.

You're drawing an unwarranted conclusion there. Just because I think there is a wrong way to use "so" does not mean I think there is an objectively correct way to use it. It's like the Sorites' paradox. Just because ten grains of rice is not a heap and a thousand grains of rice is, does not mean there is a definite number of grains of rice above which it's definitely a heap and below which it definitely isn't. Similarly, there is no objectively correct use of the word "so" (which a prescriptivist would arg

For example, "I used the so to pump gas," "When so lighting struck so barn, so fire department was called." or "So so so so so, so so so so so so so!" are all incorrect uses of the word "so" when it is intended to mean what it is generally intended to mean.

If those first two utterances were actually produced in real speech, then there is a good chance that they cannot be called "objectively incorrect" ways of using the world, inasmuch as human speech naturally features semantic shift or coining of new lexe

It's still wrong though, because in English it's not a noun at all which is the only type of word that can correctly appear in that place.

Words can and regularly do shift from one lexical category to another. Pas was a noun in late Latin (meaning 'step'), it is now a negation marker in French and Occitan. Latin nescio quid was a verb-object phrase ('I don't know what") and then became a noun meaning "something". In the language I work with most intensively, Meadow Mari, a phrase "necessary-unnecessary" has

Yes, knowledge of culture is important, but the argument the dean was making is that specific knowledge of culture and beliefs is important to all MIT graduates, which I disagree with. Most knowledge can potentially become useful, but there is so much knowledge that no one person can ever obtain all of it. That's why, contrary to the oft-quoted Heinlein line, specialization is not just for insects, but rather a necessity of being human.

And there you fall flat on your face at the end. Climatology is hard science and what it produces is reliable. What they tell the press is a different story and strongly influenced by the public not wanting to hear what they have found. Although the catastrophe is pretty much ensured at this time, it is something like 200 years away and most people are incapable of thinking in that time-frame.